Opinion--My Turn

03/28/04

On March 4, 2004, the Army announced it had failed to meet the required
destruction levels for PCBs during GB M-55 rocket trial burns at the
Anniston Chemical Disposal Facility.
 
The Chemical Weapons Working Group recently received documents reflecting
that officials knew as early as Dec. 18, 2003, that the facility was out of
compliance with its permit. Yet, the Army continued to burn until the
beginning of March, when the failure was finally made public.
 
Then, without an understanding of what had caused the failure, the
incinerator was fired back up, as if everything was fine.
 
According to the Army, trial burns are conducted to test the incinerator's
compliance with environmental regulations. If the facility passes, it's
advertised as proving any pretrial burn activities were also compliant and
all future burn operations will be compliant. Based on those assumptions,
the Army insists it doesn't have to monitor for PCBs, mercury, lead,
dioxins, etc., except during such trial burns.
 
However, if the facility fails, the Army changes its logic in interpreting
such tests. A reasonable person would conclude that since the Anniston
incinerator couldn't pass a carefully prepared trial burn of a few hundred
rockets, then the facility was out of compliance for the 17,000-plus rockets
burned before the test. But not the Army.
 
So, with the Environmental Protection Agency's blessing (EPA has authority
on PCB compliance, not the Alabama Department of Environmental Management),
the Army resumed incinerator operations, without knowing why it failed or
how many PCBs were emitted for months prior to the test burn.
 
The EPA, which is supposed to enforce regulatory laws, said the incinerator
could continue burning rockets because regulators ''haven't figured out the
reason for the failure.''
 
What makes this all the more absurd is that the Army doesn't even know how
many PCBs are being fed into the incinerator to begin with.  Reason dictates
that to demonstrate destruction capability, you need to know how much of a
substance you're starting with. Without knowing the amount of the substance
you feed into the furnace, you can never determine what percent was actually
destroyed.
 
Indeed, the federal Toxic Substances Control Act regulating PCBs burning
states, ''The rate and quantity of PCBs which are fed into the combustion
system must be measured and recorded at regular intervals . . .'' But that's
not what the Army does. The quantity of PCBs fed into the Anniston
incinerator is not calculated by an actual measurement of the PCBs contained
in rocket casings, but is based on an ''average'' concentration taken from a
few rocket samples - which doesn't at all fulfill the TSCA requirement.
 
Nevertheless, the EPA gave the Army its blessing, and the requirement was
waived. Additionally, according to an EPA document, not only were the trial
burns in violation of environmental regulations, but one of the four test
burns exceeded the standard for PCBs in the Army's own Human Health Risk
Assessment. But the EPA allowed the Army to ''recalculate'' the risk in
order to determine everything was acceptable - to whom? Obviously,
regulations enacted to protect human health and the environment don't need
to be followed if they get in  the way of incineration schedules.
 
The bottom line is, the incinerator has likely been operating in violation
of the PCB emissions and destruction requirements since the first rocket was
burned, and it is being allowed to continue operating in violation until the
Army and the EPA figure out what caused the facility to flunk the test burns
or find a way to ''game the system'' so the new test burns can be called a
success rather than a failure.
 
Of course, it will take time to review the data from the new tests.

Meanwhile, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rockets will be burned - in
violation of federal regulations.  It is our understanding the EPA will let the
Army continue to burn -failures or not - and keep allowing retests until
eventually all the rockets will be gone.

And you thought the ''P'' in EPA stood for protection? Think again.   

Craig Williams is director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group,
a Kentucky-based coalition of groups opposing incineration at eight sites
around the country. His e-mail address is craig@cwwg.org.